Stefano Ceri is professor at the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Italy; he has been visiting professor at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University between 1983 and 1990.

extending database technology to incorporate data distribution, deductive and active rules, object-orientation, and query languages for XML; and more recently on design methods for data-intensive web sites and web services. He is co-inventor of WebML - a model for the conceptual design of Web applications (US Patent 6,591,271, July 2003) - and co-founder of Web Models, a startup of Politecnico di Milano focused on WebML commercialization by means of the product WebRatio.

At ESWC-06 in Budva his research group - split between the University and Cefriel (ICT Center of Excellence For Research, Innovation, Education and industrial Labs partnership) - got the best score at the Semantic Web Services Challenge 2006 (Challenge on Automating Web Services Mediation Choreography and Discovery).

He is member of the ACM-SIGMOD Steering Committee, the VLDB Endowment, and the EDBT Foundation. He was Associate Editor of ACM-Transactions on Database Systems (1989-92) and he is currently an associated editor of several international journals, including IEEE-Transactions on Software Engineering. He is author of several articles on International Journals and Conference Proceedings, and is co-author of the books: Distributed Databases: Principles and Systems (McGraw-Hill, 1984) Logic Programming and Databases (Springer-Verlag, 1990) Conceptual Database Design: an Entity-Relationship Approach (Benjamin-Cummings, 1992) Active Database Systems (Morgan-Kaufmann, 1995) Advanced Database Systems (Morgan-Kaufmann, 1997) The Art and Craft of Computing (Addison-Wesley, 1997) Designing Database Applications with Objects and Rules: the IDEA Methodology (Addison-Wesley, 1997) Database Systems: Concepts, Languages, and Architecture (McGraw-Hill, 1999) Designing Data-Intensive Web Applications (Morgan Kaufmann, 2002). He won the 10-Years Award at VLDB 2000 for research conducted in Active Databases in 1990. He is co-editor in chief of the book series "Data Centric Systems and Applications" (Springer-Verlag). He was general program Chair of VLDB 2001 (Roma, Sept. 2001).

Ning Zhong is currently head of Knowledge Information Systems Laboratory, and a professor in Department of Systems and Information Engineering, Graduate School, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan. He is also CEO of Web Intelligence Laboratory, Inc., a new type of venture intelligent IT business company. Before moving to

Maebashi Institute of Technology, he was an associate professor in Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, Yamaguchi University, Japan. He is also director and an adjunct professor in the International WIC Institute, Beijing University of Technology.

Dr. Zhong is the editor-in-chief of the Web Intelligence and Agent Systems journal (IOS Press), and Annual Review of Intelligent Informatics (World Scientific), associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and the Knowledge and Information Systems journal (Springer), a member of the editorial board of Transactions on Rough Sets (Springer), and the editorial board of Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing (AI&KP) book series (Springer), and editor (the area of intelligent systems) of the Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering (Wiley). He has also served or is currently serving as guest editors of special issues for several international journals including IEEE Computer, Computational Intelligence (Blackwell), International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (World Scientific), International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science (Technical University Press), Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (Kluwer), Knowledge Based Systems (Elsevier), and Cognitive Systems Research (Elsevier).

Dr. Zhong is the co-founder and co-chair of Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), chair of the executive committee of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Intelligent Informatics (TCII), an advisory board member of ACM-SIGART, a steering committee member of IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), an advisory board member of International Rough Set Society.

Georg Gottlob (old web page in Vienna) is professor of Computing Science and fellow of St. Anne's College at the Oxford University, UK. His current research interests are in the areas of web data extraction, constraint satisfaction, computational logic, data bases, query languages, and complexity theory. He serves as editor-in-chief of AI

Communications, and he is on the Editorial Board of the following Journals: Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Artificial Intelligence, Informatica, Web Intelligence and Agent Systems (WIAS), Journal of Applied Logic, and Journal of Discrete Algorithms. He has received the Wittgenstein Award from the Austrian National Science Fund, is an ECCAI Fellow, and a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 1999 he was invited McKay Professor at UC Berkeley. He recently chaired the Program Committees of IJCAI'2003 and ACM PODS 2000. He supervises a number of industry projects dealing with intelligent systems and with multimedia information systems. From 1989 to 1996 he directed the industry-funded Christian Doppler Laboratory for Expert Systems.

He is the founder of the Lixto corporation, which provides solutions for automatically accessing, transforming, and syndicating data from the Deep Web. Lixto turns classic web pages into meaningful, structured data. Lixto delivers extraction and transformation services to mobile and web service providers and application software providers which are significantly easier to use through visual support. Lixto has been conceived to support and extend the vision of the "semantic web" - to make it much easier for computers and humans to access, understand, and further process web content. Georg Gottlob gave a talk about web data extraction technologies at the "W3C and Semantic Web" meeting in Vienna; he gave an invited talk about Lixto technology at the KM Europe; he gave an invited talk at the ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2004 Conference on "The Lixto Data Extraction Project: Back and Forth between Theory and Practice". He co-authored the course on "Information Extraction for the Semantic Web" at the Summer School on Reasoning Web 2005, Malta.

Ron Brachman is Vice President of Worldwide Research Operations at Yahoo! Research, the advanced research arm of the worldwide leader in Internet services. Yahoo! Research's main lab is in Santa Clara, CA, and Dr. Brachman has recently founded a lab in New York City.

Between 2002 and 2005, Dr. Brachman served as the Director of DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO), and there developed IPTO's Cognitive Systems initiative, which brought hundreds of millions of dollars to the U.S. national research community and broke substantial new ground in the development of technology and systems for automated intelligent assistance, machine learning, speech and language processing, high-productivity computing systems, coordinated operation, and other key capabilities. For his service at DARPA, Dr. Brachman was awarded The Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service.

Dr. Brachman earned his B.S.E.E. degree from Princeton University (1971), and his S.M. (1972) and Ph.D. (1977) degrees from Harvard University. He has made numerous important contributions to Artificial Intelligence (AI), including developing the cornerstone ideas behind the subfield of Description Logics, which has had substantial influence in the recent development of the Semantic Web. He has been awarded best paper and "Classic Paper" awards, and has published an important textbook with Hector Levesque, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Brachman started his career at Bolt Beranek & Newman in Cambridge, MA; spent several years at Fairchild/Schlumberger’s Lab for AI Research in Palo Alto, CA; and, having developed a world-class AI group at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, moved into senior research management jobs at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs. Brachman was President of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) from 2003-2005. He is a Founding Fellow of AAAI and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). At the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in January of 2007 he will be awarded the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award.